[T]he national press corps’ “big feet” owe it to the country to put aside their pack mentality and subject McCain to the same critical scrutiny as other presidential hopefuls.

A year ago, on “Hardball,” Matthews asked about Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations: “What have you done to deserve this job?”

The program’s guest allowed that this was a “tough question” facing the full field of candidates.

“Not so much for McCain,” Matthews interrupted. “He has deserved the presidency. Whether he should be president or not, it’s up to the voters.”

It’s a different standard.

I don’t know if Joel was tipped that the New York Times bombshell was about to drop, but his column couldn’t have been more timely. Last night after reading the headlines of McCain’s alleged affair with a lobbyist 30 years his junior, and his inappropriate ties to firms with business before his committee, I flipped through the cable news channels expecting to see the media in a fevered feeding frenzy. Virtually nada. You’d think CNN and FOX News hadn’t discovered the Internet yet, while what little coverage I saw on MSNBC was almost apologetic: it’s a “ten year old story”, we were told… “anonymous sources” and “firm denials” from the campaign… there’s no there there. This despite the fact that as they spoke the Washington Post had already named names:

John Weaver, who was McCain’s closest confidant until leaving his current campaign last year, said he met with Vicki Iseman at the Center Cafe at Union Station and urged her to stay away from McCain. Association with a lobbyist would undermine his image as an opponent of special interests, aides had concluded.

By this morning, the right wing propaganda machine was in top gear, attempting to make this a story about the NY Times credibility, not Sen. McCain’s… and how this unfolds over the next few days and weeks will tell Joel everything he needs to know about the objectivity, impartiality and courage of his colleagues in the legacy press. Anybody who knows anything about the workings of the corporate media knows that the NY Times only ran this story after extensive research and internal debate, and only after an excruciating vetting by their attorneys. And, at it’s heart, this is not merely a story about an inappropriate relationship (sexually consummated or not) between a then 63-year-old US senator and a 32-year-old lobbyist; this is a story about an inappropriate relationship between a US senator and lobbyists and their clients who had business before his committee. This is the story about a presidential candidate who runs on his reputation as a champion of campaign finance reform and breaking the power of special interests, while at the same time using his influence on behalf of companies giving him tens of thousands of dollars in contributions and flying him around on their private jet.

This is a story about hypocrisy.

If this were a story about Barack Obama it would likely cost him the nomination. If Hillary Clinton, a married woman, was exposed as having had a romantic affair, it would likely end her political career. But “Straight Talk” McCain, a man who has admitted to past infidelity (he began his affair with his current wife before divorcing his first)… he, we are told, should receive the benefit of the doubt. If he denies having sex with Ms. Iseman, then that should be the end of that. And if the sexual allegation is dismissed, then that means all the other very serious allegations in the NY Times article should be dismissed as well. At least, that is the GOP spin we’re hearing today coming from their official and unofficial mouthpieces.

But this is not an unsourced smear as the McCain camp has framed it, and it is not a he said/she said about sex. The NY Times published a well sourced article about official corruption, and it is time for the DC media to abandon their myth about the straight talking McCain, and as Joel says, subject him to “the same critical scrutiny as other presidential hopefuls.”

The right will attempt to do to the NY Times what they did to Dan Rather. Shame on the traditional media if they succeed. And shame on us in the blogosphere if we allow that to happen without putting up one helluva fight.

If this were a story about Barack Obama it would likely cost him the nomination. If Hillary Clinton, a married woman, was exposed as having had a romantic affair, it would likely end her political career.

That’s an odd statement, given that the last presidential figure to have not one, but several extramarital accusations, went on to not only win his nomination, but two terms as president.

You’re missing my emphasis on the word “woman”. As it is, Bill’s sexual indiscretions probably cost Hillary enough good will that it cost her the nomination.

As for Obama, if the press is willing to repeat and repeat and repeat the fully debunked Islamic Madrassa bullshit, or parse his wife’s words for meaning of the word “really,” you can be sure that any well supported scandal would be national headlines from now until November.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I heard quite a few Republicans agreeing that Hillary’s “inability to control her own husband’s infidelity” was conclusive evidence that she wasn’t qualified to run the whole country. Certainly I disagree, but in a close election it doesn’t take that many who think that way to hurt her.

So I think Goldy is correct in #3: Bill’s indescretions probably cost Gore the Presidency, and may be enough to cost Hillary the nomination.

But gee whiz, I think the NYT story about McCaine probably helps him with the Republican base, rather than hurt him.

“He gets cozy with lobbyists, accepts favors from companies having business before his committee, and still has a libido at 71??? Just our kind of man! Maybe all that fuss about “reform” is just a campaign tactic after all – as long as he really continues the Bush & Co. politics for the next eight years, maybe we (the Republicans) can learn to live with him!”

Gipper @ 4 is ereby nominated for the most ridiculous, racist, bigoted, rant of the day. Even though it’s early, that’s quite an accomplishment which I think even the regular right-wing trolls on this board will find hard to beat.

So if “Gipper” is going to vote for McCain, I think that pretty much explains why the rest of the nation shouldn’t.

Please, if this woman did anything with him in bed, she probably wore nose plugs and duct tape over her eyes. Take a look at McCain….yikes he’s one fugly mutha. Na, this was all business. A K Street call girl working the DC street corners.

@4You Dimocrats are just jealous! How many 70 year old Dems, after blowing hash for fifty years, can even get a polite salute outs their willy much less bag a babe like this!

My great-grandfather’s older brother, who came to this country at the age of 14 from (what is now) Belarus and later became the head of a union in New Jersey had his third kid at the young age of 73. And that was BEFORE Viagra.

That said, my hunch is that this story is coming out now in order to help McCain. His campaign’s public finance shenanigans are far worse (see what TPM and Mark Schmitt have been digging up) and now it’ll buried under this less meaty, but more flashy story.

I just read the NYT piece. Actually, I thought it was pretty balanced. I don’t see it as a smoking gun against McCain – it’s pretty hard for anybody in the Senate for any length of time to avoid charges of being unduly enfluenced by lobbyists, when a good part of their job deals with hearing from all sides on issues before the Congress and their committees – and that includes lobbyists. And he wouldn’t be the first to accept a few private airplane flights,meals, etc.

The only reason its a story is that it is a counterpoint to his campaign posture as a “reformer”.

The part about the female lobbyist having to be told to stay away from the campaign was expressly denied by everyone in the story as a “romantic” link. The fact that she is relatively young (in her 30’s) and attractive certainly doesn’t hurt her in her job, aside from any actual romantic involvement. I knew a woman who once was a drug sales rep who visited doctor’s offices all day long – she said it was common practice to hire young attractive women for this job, as doctors were more likely to give them a substantial amount of time during their busy schedules than they would a middle-aged man.

But that’s not the point of the story – it’s not whether there is a romantic link or not, it’s whether he is still too enfluenced by lobbyists.

In other words, you don’t have to be “in bed together” to be “in bed together” – if you follow my meaning (Abramahoff (sp?) and DeLay, for example).

Artfart @ 17: We obviously grew up in different areas of the country. I remember being a senior in high school, and one of my classmates said she couldn’t go to the football game, because her mother was having her 30th birthday party, and she had to attend. My guess is her mother had to be 13 at the time of her birth? But remember, I grew up in Tennessee….

” Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader yesterday launched an investigative series on Sen. Mitch McConnell pushing legislation for his affluent donors — an effort originally paid for by a foundation that has financed several liberal groups that oppose the Republican lawmaker.

The paper’s parent firm, McClatchy Co., decided last week to repay the $35,000 grant, which underwrote six months of salary and expenses for a Herald-Leader reporter on leave. The grant came from the respected Center for Investigative Reporting, which was passing on money provided by the St. Louis-based Deer Creek Foundation.

Deer Creek has funded a variety of liberal groups, including New York University law school’s Brennan Center for Justice, which represented opponents of McConnell in a campaign-finance lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court.

“It’s like the NRA funding a report about Sarah Brady,” the gun-control advocate, says McConnell spokesman Don Stewart. “You’ve got to be somewhat leery about the objectivity.””

Since most of the country didn’t give a shit about Clinton getting a blow job in the Oval Office and excoriated the Republicans for making the issue out of it, to be consistent they should have similar wrath for the NY Times and shouldn’t give a shit about McCain schtooping this chick, assuming its even true.

I just call them as I see them, regardless of the target. In this case, it’s an interesting article, but not a smoking gun. I pretty much felt the same way about McCain after I read the article as I did before.

But I wouldn’t be throwing out the hypocracy charges just yet. I’m sure Rove has quite a few smear pieces planned for Hillary or Obama, which he will start putting out to the media as soon as the target becomes clear. And I’m sure that there will be far less evidence behind them, and certainly less carefull and reasoned journalism, than the NYT piece. He may even have another “hand grenade” like the purported letter from Bush’s commander used by Sixty Minutes, just to make journalists are too timid to run with any more legitimate pieces against McCain.

I’m just hoping that the media is a lot more careful this time around. They need to vet their pieces a lot more carefully, both to avoid the “hand grenade”, and also to avoid being used to circulate false smear jobs like the Swift Boat allegations. It’s not enough just to publish a story and a denial from the other side. They need to carefully investigate such stories, and if it is false, call the other side publically on the carpet for trying to mislead the voters.

I thought in 2004 the Democrats had too many “second stringers” running for the nomination, with a predictable result. This year, the Republicans seem to have had to go deep into their reserves, to their third-string candidates. McCain just happens to be the best of those available “third-stringers”. Not an intellectual heavyweight, one who can’t seem to recognize when his personal conduct doesn’t match his espoused principles, and a tendency to be too chummy with lobbyist. Even the Republicans aren’t too happy with this result (for different reasons).

Does that help you to understand the REAL story of Mr. McCain-Feingold amendment, proponent of clean elections – who was screwing around with a lobbyist for a company that his committee is in charge of – and writng letters on her companies behalf as a committee member?

Hypocrisy is the knife that cuts deepest.

Typical republican reaction: Clinton did it (almost a reflexive response), it is all about the sex (the prurient interest is paramount – isn’t it great that republicans have virility at advanced ages) and at least she is a woman (compared to other “really bad” republicans who mess with men).

I do not know if this was brought up yet or not, but does anyone remember this type of event happening to John Kerry? It was also found out to be not true. Now I may be cynical, but I want actual proof before I go off the handle on this. I didn’t go crazy when it happened in 2004, and I won’t now until it is truly confirmed.

@45: Screwing around – spending a lot of time with (I was using a double entendre)…..there is proof of McCain spending a great deal of time with this woman and his aides getting nervous about it – whether or not they were romantically involved – he wrote on behalf of HER company.

Puddy: Which Katrina post? The one where you accused Blanco of stopping Red Cross deliveries of water to the SuperDome? I did respond to that, as did several others. If you had more to say, I must have missed it. I don’t repeatedly keep going back to read what others have said in regards to my posts. If a post is more than a day or so old, I seldom hit it again.

I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that’s how she really feels — that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever — then that’s legit.

Since the NY Times inferred McCain might have had an affair. This also reminds me of Brian Ross of ABC News and his Mark Foley had sex conversations with underage boys to only have to retract it later saying he did nothing illegal.

I heard allegations that Darcy Burners campaign wanted Goldy to stop hanging out wither her so much because it looks like they are having an affair. There, no the Seattle press have exactly what the NYT has.

“Last night after reading the headlines of McCain’s alleged affair with a lobbyist 30 years his junior, and his inappropriate ties to firms with business before his committee, … ”

It was all very predictable. The first thing McCain did after being repatriated from the POW camp was cheat on his wife (who had been disfigured in a car crash). And in case anyone has forgotten what McCain’s ethics are, he was one of the “Keating Five” senators. Like Dumbya, McCain was a ne’er-do-well slacker scion of a prominent who rode to position and power on family coattails, having done absolutely nothing on his own to earn it. And, like Dumbya, he is a notorious underachiever and underperformer — the last thing we need a a successor to the Worst.President.Ever.

Hey righties, I have a question for y’all. If the media is “liberal biased,” how come they jumped all over Drudge’s false tale of Kerry having an affair with an intern with blaring headlines, but they’re burying the story about McCain’s “inappropriate relationship” with a lobbyist in the back pages and fine print?

Oh, and one more thing — who owns and controls the media, and decides what gets into the paper or on the airwaves, $900-a-week reporters who (decreasingly) have a liberal bent, or wealthy rightwing media owners who hire publishers and editors to make sure the owner’s (not employees’) views are reflected in what is printed or broadcast?

“If he denies having sex with Ms. Iseman, then that should be the end of that.”

No, it should not be the end of that, because he’s probably lying. You don’t expect him to admit it, do you? If he does admit it, then that should be the end of it. But if he lies about it, that should be only the beginning of the scrutiny.

Of course, the irony of wingnuts condemning (up to and including an impeachment vote in the Senate) Clinton for lying about illicit sex while knee-jerk defending McCain upon his being accusing of having illicit sex (and, if he did, he’s already lied about it) will be lost on no one except wingnuts.

Personally, I don’t care who McCain fucks or who fucks him (although I do “pity the fool,” to cop a phrase). It is well known that he is an adulterer from eyars back. Yawn.

But when important Congressmen attempt to sway Congressional committees on behalf of lobbyists with whom they are friendly or writes letters to an agency over which his committee has oversight on behalf of corporations who have flown him aound the country on their private jets, it is either the appearance of a conflict of interest or an actual conflict of interest. And when a 70-year-old man hangs out with young women who have lobbying business before his Commerce Committee, it is either the appearance of a conflict of interest or an actual conflict of interest. McCain simply denies that any of it happened, and expects us to beleive it even though it’s appearing in sourced news stories.

@80: Zactly – well said Daddy. It is not the implication of an affair that is tantamount here – it is the implication of illegal influence – and McCain was chair of the committee that oversees the FEC and wrote letter to the committee about a business deal involving her client that she was lobbying for.

In late 1999, McCain twice wrote letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Florida-based Paxson Communications — which had paid Iseman as its lobbyist — urging quick consideration of a proposal to buy a television station license in Pittsburgh. At the time, Paxson’s chief executive, Lowell W. “Bud” Paxson, also was a major contributor to McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. McCain did not urge the FCC commissioners to approve the proposal, but he asked for speedy consideration of the deal, which was pending from two years earlier. In an unusual response, then-FCC Chairman William Kennard complained that McCain’s request “comes at a sensitive time in the deliberative process” and “could have procedural and substantive impacts on the commission’s deliberations and, thus, on the due process rights of the parties.”

McCain wrote the letters after he received more than $20,000 in contributions from Paxson executives and lobbyists. Paxson also lent McCain his company’s jet at least four times during 1999 for campaign travel.

Look, I know as much as everyone else here does, that if a sexual relationshiop was proven, that it would pretty much derail McCain’s candidacy. And the salaciousness of the story would pretty much keep it in the headlines, much more so than McCain’s temper or poor judgement or hypocracy in dealing with lobbyists.

But I’m assuming, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, that the denials of McCain and the lobbyist are true, and that there was no sexual relationship between the two.

But that leaves us with a man in his 60’s (at the time, now 71) who likes to spend so much time with a realtively attractive woman lobbyist in her 30’s that his campaign staff felt compelled to intervene. Now, if there was no sexual relationship, why would this be a problem?

Well, certainly there is the “appearance” problem. Coming so shortly after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I’m sure every campaign staff in the 2000 elections were trying to keep their candidates insulated from young women who weren’t there wives.

But why wouldn’t the staff just tell McCain to cut off contact, and have him do so? Surely he could be trusted to take such simple campaign advice, if he exercised any amount of judgement. Instead, they had to organize a bit of a coup, going directly to the lobbyist and telling her to stay away, for McCain’s own benefit.

Why would they have to approach it that way? I suspect it’s because McCain is like a lot of us – we really, really like it when a younger, attractive woman fawns all over us. It’s really hard to resist. Even when we don’t have any intention of consumating a sexual relationship, we don’t want to cut off the attention we receive by pushing the woman away. Most women who are genuinely interested in a romantic or sexual relationship will figure it out pretty quickly and if the relationship doesn’t progress they will cut it off and look elsewhere.

But some women are very good at using the sexual tension to make progress in their careers. You will see them sometimes in sales and marketing and yes, in lobbying. It’s a difficult high-wire act – they have to make themselves seem available and interested, but just distant enough so that the relationship won’t be consumated. It’s the tension, the promise of a possibility of a relationship, that serves them best. This ensures them continued access, and a man who is willing to do things to please them, just so that they can continue to receive the attention that they crave.

I’m sure that there are men who are salesmen or lobbyist who also use their charms on women (or possibly other men?), but since that wouldn’t work on me, I don’t pay enough attention to notice them.

So what does this say about McCain? Well, it says that he has some poor judgement on these matters, in that he risks getting involved in another problem similar to the “Keating 5” in order to keep this “platonic relationship” with this woman lobbyist. Considering the recent similar problems Bill Clinton had, you would have thought this lesson was apparant to everyone in Washington at this point. At McClain’s age, he should know how to keep his libido and his ego in check enough to keep his distance, and just keeping his pants zipped is not enough, if he ends up doing what the lobbyist wants, with or without sex.

I think we can all agree that the subversion of the basic functioning of the federal government (see, e.g., US Attorneys scandal, FEMA, etc.) has been a major problem during the Bush years and we see here that McCain takes a Bush-like attitude to the integrity of these processes.

“I don’t know if Joel was tipped that the New York Times bombshell was about to drop …”

Oh please. This is JC we’re talking about, the bloated commie gasbag. He gets his tips from the same place everybody gets their tips, Drudge. Matt in the Hat was posting in December about the Jayson Blair Times civil war over its empty story. The New Republic pushed the Times into going public with what it had, which is a little less than nothing.

Hillary affair? Mickey Kaus at kausfiles.com had a post about Hillary’s hot lesbian sex with one of the fine babes who was running Hillary’s fine romp to the nomination.

Barack attack? SoundPolitics, today, has a link to Osama Obama’s Hag fag problem, an ignorred but insistent boy toy who has attested in court that Barack in 1999 did dope before doing the boy toy.

Edwards? Enquirer had the story of Bouffant John’s Monkey Business. Nobody paid attention, because nobody but Goldstein paid attention to Edwards.

Kerry bimbo eruption of 2004? Ditto.

Bill Clinton and a kneepads intern? I mean, come on. Not even Republicans gave credence to a story that crazy.

No, I’m not going to call someone out of the blue to ask their opinion on a political issue. I’m not a journalist, so I don’t think I have the right to intrude upon their presumably busy schedule that way. But I will do a quick search, and within a few minutes I found a couple of items of interest.

First, as soon as Rove got back from his vacation, he did what he did best: try to deflect attention from the incompetence of the Bush administration, and blame anyone else, including the victims. The Red Cross story seems to be part of that, as the official story of the Red Cross changed over a couple of weeks time, to one consistent with the story line Rove was selling, and was eagerly being picked up by Limbaugh and O’Reilly:

(No, I don’t expect you would accept anything published by Media Matters, but that’s your problem, not mine).

Second, the time-line indicates that Homeland Security and FEMA were pretty much had their rear ends up the nether regions, being blissfully unaware of problems which were being reported on the national media for several days. Note the timeline of events for Thursday, the fourth day of the tragedy:

“Thurs 1-Sep ~ Military increases National Guard deployment to 30,000. Violence, carjacking, looting continues. Military helicopters shot at while evacuating residents. FEMA water rescue operations suspended because of gunfire. ~ Nagin issues a “desperate SOS” for more buses. ~ President Bush appoints George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton to fundraise for hurricane victims. ~ Halliburton awarded Navy contract for storm cleanup. ~ Sandbags arrive for levees. ~ Superdome and Convention Center now housing up to 45,000 refugees. ~ Senators return from recess to being work on emergency aid bill. ~ DHS Secretary Chertoff states in an interview that he was not aware of the people at the convention center until recently. ~ 8:00 PM Brown states (on Paula Zahn’s show) that he became aware of the convention center problem only a few hours before.”

Now, the reason why I, and most of the country, were astounded by these statements (that they had only heard of the problems at the convention center a few hours before) is that we had been watching TV for several days, and were well aware of the problems which being reported on – on an hourly basis – by those reporters. Why wouldn’t the apparatus of the Bush administration know this? My guess is that either (a) they never watch anything other than Fox News, wich was too busy covering looting to deal with the other issues, or (b) they didn’t have any way to contact the people in charge at FEMA, or (c) they did contact FEMA, but they were more concerned about Brown getting a quite dinner in Baton Rouge (as his e-mails proved) or finalizing the no-bid clean-up contract with Haliburton (while people were still clinging to rooftops).

None of this really deals with the real problem with FEMA’s response to Katrina, however. The Bush administration considered FEMA to be a “glorified welfare agency”, a product of the Clinton administration. It’s goal was to essentially dismantal it, and turn over its duties to state and local governments as yet another “unfunded mandate”, with only minor coordination duties. Brown’s appointment reveals the importance the agency held in the Bush administration eyes. And when FEMA was folded into Homeland Security, funding (and initiatives) were dramatically reduced. Most of the disaster preperation officials resigned in the next three years, disgusted at the dismanteling of everything they had built over the previous eight years. This left FEMA completely unprepared to respond to a real emergency, with an incompetent director, few resources, and an untested staff. It was a recipie for a bureaucratic disaster, which only compounded the natural disaster.

Later, Bush tried to deflect criticism by saying that no one could have predicted the scope of the disaster which hit New Orleans. No one, perhaps, except (a) anyone who has read the disaster drills held by the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, and local authorities previously, (b) anyone who had read the New Orleans Times/Picayune series of stories published the previous year, or (c) any one of the number of media stories published regularly in the national media which warned that New Orleans was gradually sinking, and that a hurricane would have a disasterous result in a city where most of the land is below the river level.

It as at this point – Thursday, Sept. 1st, 2005 – that the country saw the huge disconnect between the Bush administration and reality. They saw that the Bush administration was more concerned with repairing their public image than it was in dealing with the disaster facing thousands of people in New Orleans. Ever since then, they have no longer been willing to accept the Bush administration’s word on anything, without solid proof supporting it. And thereafter, it became clear that there was often no proof to support what they had to say – regarding Katrina, regarding Iraq, regarding many other things.

Amity Shlaes reported that rich radicals such as Michael Moore and Spike Lee harmed the victims of Hurricane Katrina by distorting the truth about their ordeal. Lee, for example, repeated Kanye West’s slander that the federal government let New Orleans die because George Bush and Condoleezza Rice don’t like black people.

Unlike Lee, Moore, and West, liberal historian Douglas Brinkley of Tulane University was there in New Orleans when the levee broke. A New York Times review of Brinkley’s book, The Great Deluge, notes that the federal government made mistakes (just as Clinton’s FEMA did when responding to Hurricane Floyd in 1999), but it was Mayor Ray Nagin “who waited too long to order a mandatory evacuation, who left the buses to rot, who turned his back on those who couldn’t leave. It was Nagin, ‘terrified for his own personal safety,’ who rarely visited the frantic throngs at the Superdome and the convention center … Rarely have so many desperate Americans been so completely abandoned by their government.”

Journalists who showed up to sift the ruins for dirt compounded Katrina’s destruction by recycling lies about the President’s “racism” and by rushing to print with racist rumors about the storm’s poorest victims who, it was falsely reported, were shooting at rescue helicopters, killing each other in the Superdome, and raping children.

Amity Shlaes is correct. The citizens of New Orleans, victims of America’s worst disaster, are being victimized now by rich reporters and celebrities who are using a city’s pain for their own profit.

Notes from the NYT Book Review, 9 July 2006, ‘Hell & High Water’ – David Oshinsky (Review of ‘The Great Deluge’, Douglas Brinkley):

Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center warned the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, that his city was in peril.

For Brinkley, who teaches history at Tulane University in New Orleans, Katrina has a deeply personal edge. One can easily read ‘The Great Deluge’ as a morality tale, pitting helpless victims, heroic citizens and a few decent politicians against an inept bureaucracy at every link in the chain. This was an avoidable catastrophe, more the fault of man than of nature, Brinkley says, and those responsible must be held to account.

City administrators had done no serious hurricane planning, despite repeated warnings from the scientific community.

Though Nagin ’strongly advised’ people to leave, he didn’t issue a mandatory evacuation order until the following day. By then, about 20 percent of the 460,000 residents were still in the city.

Buses were supposed to evacuate them, but many of the drivers had fled the city and hardly anyone knew where to go to be picked up. Among the most infamous photos of the Katrina disaster are the ones showing rows of buses sitting idly on flooded ground.

Survivors straggled into the Superdome and the convention center … Rarely have so many desperate Americans been so completely abandoned by their government.

The White House was remote and unresponsive, viewing natural disaster relief as a distraction from the war on terror. … In one instance, dozens of first responders — including firefighters and paramedics — were diverted from New Orleans to Atlanta ‘for training on rules against sexual harassment.’

[The Cajun Navy: rural whites who strapped their boats to their pickups and traveled in caravans to New Orleans. Sweeping through black neighborhoods by day, sleeping in their trucks at night, the Cajuns saved close to 4,000 lives.]

On the local level, Brinkley sees one villain above all. The Ray Nagin we meet in these pages is part coward, part showboat, part Uncle Tom. A pawn of the city’s business elite, ‘always deferential to whites,’ he sold out his race. … When it comes to poor people, the book suggests, the mayor couldn’t have cared less.

It was Nagin who waited too long to order a mandatory evacuation, who left the buses to rot, who turned his back on those who couldn’t leave. It was Nagin, ‘terrified for his own personal safety,’ who rarely visited the frantic throngs at the Superdome and the convention center …

Oh, and regarding the gunfire in New Orleans, which provided the rationale for suspending rescue operations from Wednesday onward….

I spoke with a family which was being relocated from Katrina, and sponsored by another family in my church. I asked them about this. Why would anybody fire at rescue workers?

They scoffed. “Nobody was firing at rescue workers”, they said. “What was happening was that people were on roofs for several days. They saw boats go buy to pick up other families, but they didn’t stop for them. They saw helicopters doing the same. There was just too many people. So some of the people, the ones that had guns, were firing them in the air to try to get the attention of the rescue workers. They figured that they just weren’t being heard, so they tried to get their attention. After three days on a roof, you start to get pretty desperate.”

She hadn’t heard of anybody actually firing at rescue workers. She also hadn’t heard that rescue efforts were suspended for more than two days due to concerns over safety of the rescue workers. She was angered by that. She figured felt that it was just somebody trying to find an excuse to justify not doing anything.

I’m not saying that there weren’t problems in New Orleans after the hurricane. After three days without resources or law, problems will happen. But I think Rove & Fox News tried their best to exaggerate it, in order to deflect blame from their own problems and instead blame the victims – a process which continues to this day.

I’m not saying what you’re not saying, 92. The pat-itself-on-the-back press applauded itself, gave itself Pulitzers or Pelletizers, for reporting assaults that never happened and rapes that never happened.

I submit that the press also spun us about the ‘inept’ or ‘racist’ response to America’s biggest natural disaster since Galveston/1900.

“It was Nagin, ‘terrified for his own personal safety,’ who rarely visited the frantic throngs at the Superdome and the convention center … “

Gee, I saw television interviews with Nagin throughout the week following Katrina, at the Superdome, where he was pleading for help from the Federal Government. Doesn’t seem to me that he abandoned them for his own safety.

“This was an avoidable catastrophe, more the fault of man than of nature, Brinkley says, and those responsible must be held to account.”

There were frequent attempts to make some sort of coordinated plan for a potential hurricane strike on New Orleans, over the past twenty years. Certainly, New Orleans politics has problems dealing with big issues, and the multiple “levy boards” covering multiple parishes contribued to the problems. Considering that here in Seattle we still can’t get the Alaska Way Viaduct rebuilt (despite almost eight years of warnings it will collapse in the next earthquake), or the 520 bridge rebuilt (despite at least twenty years of admitting that it is inadequate for current traffic, and maybe dangerous in an earthquake), I don’t think we are in any position to point fingers.

But more importantly, a city can’t do it by itself. There needs to be lots of coordination between a lot of governments and agencies, state, local, and federal. FEMA, the Corps of Engineers, the state Nat. Guard, all need a cohesive plan. When Clinton left office, plans were in place to fund those projects. But after FEMA was in the process of being dismantled, with funding diverted to other areas, most of the planning sessions were cancelled. One that did take place included local officials asking FEMA for assistance in providing tents to temporarily house those displaced by a hurricane. “Tents!???” they resonded incredously, “Americans won’t live in tents!!!!”, and they went away without responding to the issue of where the displaced people will live.

I’m looking for the link to that session, I used to have it, but I’m having trouble locating it now.

“…recycling lies about the President’s “racism”…”

Gee, like the comment made by Bush’s mother, seeing displaced refugees being bused into the Astrodome….

“These people, you know, are underprivildged, so this is actually working out very well for them….”

Oh, and by the way Puddy, good job of trying to divert the thread from McCain’s goofs to the Katrina story. Do you guys take lessons in this from Rove? I thought he quit giving classes on these subjects in 1972 or 1973, when he was recorded teaching college Republicans how to conduct dirty tricks in political campaigns and was subsequently investigated by the FBI as part of the Watergate investigations.

This scandal is, in the end, as always, about money. It’s about how powerful interests who can afford to buy influence us it to enrich themselves at our expense.

For example, between 2000 and 2004 the rich gave GOP candidates approximately $4 billion in campaign donations. They received $400 billion of tax breaks in return. That’s a 100-to-1 return on investment.

It works the same with lobbyists and the special interests who pay them. They don’t do it for fun. Lobbying is a profit center. It takes many forms but always has one result: It transfers large amounts of money from people who don’t have political influence to people who do. So much money that the funds invested in campaigns, lobbying, and influence buying are multiplied many, many, many times over.

They can’t get those kinds of returns by investing in their businesses. That’s why they invest in policians.

Brown’s explanation of FEMA’s failures: “First, I failed initially to set up regular briefings with the media….Second, I very strongly personally regret that I was unable to persuade Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down, get over their differences, and and work together. I just couldn’t pull that off…”

The Facts: As Brown’s e-mails indicated, FEMA officials were working hard to convey to brown the desperate nature of the task they were facing, and the inadequate nature of the assistance they were receiving. But Brown made almost no decisions, few directives, and spent more e-mails worrying about his appearance and clothing when he was before TV cameras, where he was to eat, and arranging for someone to sit with his dog.

Note also that the White House refused to provide many e-mail messages, especially those between Brown and anybody in the White House. Brown was being left to twist slowly in the wind, and expendable sacrafice, but the Bush administration wasn’t about to cooperate in providing any evidence of their own complicity in the disaster.

RR at 98: Don’t forget that if done in an imaginative fashion, lobbying can be funded by the taxpayers, and work solely for the benefit of the politicians!

Take, for example, a scheme set up by former Republican Congressman DeLay of Texas. He is one of the authors of the “K Street Project”, indicted as part of the Abramohoff scandal. One of the things he was NOT indicted for was a scheme to establish a lobbying office in Washington D.C. to put forward the interests of Texas with the federal government.

Gee, wasn’t that the job of the Congressmen? But I digress…

Anyway, here’s how it works. The State of Texas sets up a lobbying office in Washington, D.C. They fund it through taxpayer money. The lobbying office hires a lobbying firm to to represent the state of Texas, giving them a very large retainer to do so (the taxpayer money). The lobbying firm them makes substantial campaign contributions to selected Republican Congressmen (including DeLay), to ensure that they have “access” to the Congressmen to make sure that the interests of Texas are considered in any pending legislation.

Whollah!!! (or however the heck you spell that). The tax money of texas citizens is magically transformed into a “legal” campaign contribution directed to keep Congressmen in office (but only Republican Congressman). This apparantly is what DeLay had in mind when he sought to ensure a “Permanant Republican Majority”.

I wonder how the wingnuts would feel if their tax money was being directed to Rick Lowry’s re-election campaign??? You would be they would be screaming and looking for the tar and feathers, wouldn’t you???? But I guess it is okay in this case, because it’s a Republican, after all….

Gee, I swear, you have to study Machiavelli to keep up with the Republicans these days…..

Did a quick click for the alleged link, and haven’t found it. Yet. Know it’s bad form to “cite” a citation without being able to produce it … but think I heard there’s final proof that McCain’s hottie bought or smooched no special access to McCain. She got no favors. Or so they say.

Here it is. Democrats should wear Hawaiian shirts and straw sun hats with “Hanoi” emblazoned acorss the front. Here’s the meme: John McCain got himself shot down just so that he could do a little soft time in a POW camp instead of the dangerous work of actually fighting the enemy in Viet Nam.

Hey, he must have intentionally gotten himself shot down because, after all, what competent pilot would let third-rate, Third-World pilots in inferior Russian crap or pajama-clad barbarians with pop guns to get the better of him on a level field? You know, he just wanted to cool it somewhere for a few years where there weren’t guns going off all the time! It’s so loud and all, besides being dangerous.

And for his supporters who want to say “But…but..he was tortured!!!” I would say, gee, you think now that stress positions, periodic beatings, and water torture waterboarding are “torture?” Come on, a few “splashes of water in his face” and other techniques that are currently in use by our Noble Warriors On Terra™ couldn’t possibly be torture. Come on! They are a legitimate means of extracting information when time is of the essence. You know, I am sure that McCain knew of impending missions against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN, or North Vietnam), and they had every right under international law to do anything that was not “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Right?

RHP: Perhaps your beef is with Brinkley, who was there. Seems that his testimony, as conveyed in the review noted above, is consistent with testimony from your parishoners.

You know, of course, that the Democratic mayor of New Orleans said then and later that he was getting more cooperation from nominally Republican federal agencies than from Blanco’s Democrats in Baton Rouge. It’s also said that Democrat Blanco and Democrat Landreau were loathe, in a Reconstruction state, to appear to be cooperating with Republicans from D.C.

You seem to have missed that it has little or nothing to do with the “hottie” and everything to do with McCain exerting undue and untimely influence on an agency under his committee’s oversight after receiving $20K and corporate jet travel in his Presidential campaign from the telecom (Paxton) in question, for whom, I am sure only coincidentally, the hottie was busy lobbying.

Actually, the sight of what you call the “Cajun Navy”, starting the day after Katrina hit, made me very proud.

Even though FEMA told citizens not to attempt rescue efforts until they had a plan established and places set up to receive the refugees (they never did accomplished that task), the rednecks from rural southern Lousiana and Mississippi did what they did best – quickly identify the need, ignore authority, and do what had to be done, in a direct and effective manner. Those were my peeps, people I grew up with and understand well, for all their quirks, eccentricities, and positive and negative attributes. You may or might not agree with their religion or politics, but if you get stuck in the mud or in a ditch, or on a rooftop with floodwaters all around you, these are the people who will rescue you the quickest – whether it will be in a camo-painted 4X4 with a winch to get you out of a ditch, or in a bass boat to get you off a rooftop. That’s what they live for.

800 days is too long to be waiting for a regulatory agency decision, which is the issue brought to McCain’s committee in this case of alleged undue influence on behalf of a lobbyist. If McCain wrote a letter asking the agency to make a decision, that sounds warranted to me, unless he told them what decision to make. If we tell Congressmen and Senators that they cannot listen to complaints of inadequate government agency performance or they will be accused of associating with special interest lobbyists, then what happened to our constitutional right to petition for redress?

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